Biosphere #1
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Imagine what it would be like if you could pick up the phone and order the weather you wanted. Hi I'm Bryan Yeaton, and this is the Weather Notebook. Scientists working inside the giant laboratory of Biosphere-2 in Oracle, Arizona can do just that, as Allan Coukell reports.
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| Photo: Road Trip Adventures |
That same level of control means that scientists who study the effects of climate change also like to work indoors. And one of the best places for them to do that is in Arizona, inside a giant greenhouse.
Kevin Griffin from the Columbia University Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory works inside the huge structure known as "Biosphere-2".
"It's as high as 70 feet in some places. It's got an ocean, a rainforest, a desert, a savannah, a thorn scrub and a former agriculture area, which we now use for forestry research".
Most laboratories are too small to study the effects of climate change, but the Biosphere is huge. That allows Dr Griffin to study the effects of increased carbon dioxide or global warming in a realistic setting. In effect, he's got his own weather - indoors.
"Inside a biosphere, we can grow a fifty-foot-tall tree and see how it responds. And at the same time, I can pick up the phone and say "I'd like it five degrees warmer tonight." And I've got it. That's an amazing amount of analytical power".
Trees take carbon dioxide out of the air, so that analytical power is important for understanding, not just forests, but also the changing atmosphere.
That's correspondent Allan Coukell who controls his indoor temperature in Auckland, New Zealand. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory. It is funded by the National Science Foundation. For more on climate control, click on our website at weathernotebook.org.
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